There are a number of events that focus on Arab and Arabic literatures at this year’s Edinburgh International Book Festival. Contributor Raphael Cormack attended two, and found that, “Where political analysis falls apart, literature and fiction can say something.”

Mahmoud Darwish once wrote, of Gaza, “We are unfair to her when we search for her poems.” We are certainly unfair when we scrabble anywhere for poems, searching for aesthetic pleasure in others’ suffering. But here, poetry seems to have welled up from the need to speak, to create, to defy silence.

As translated Elliott Colla recently noted, Raba’i al-Madhoun’s International Prize for Arabic Fiction-shortlisted novel “The Lady from Tel Aviv” is perhaps the only novel by a Gazan author translated into English.